table soup

Am working on SEO (search engine optimization) of a website to take it out of “table soup” (i.e., lots of nested tables) and put it into CSS. Have put the new sample page up here: New css formatted page. Is it worth it? I think so. The code went from 364 lines of HTML code to less than a hundred lines of code. That’s got to do something for keyword density! And readability by the search engines. Next step is to optimize the site for the search engines and then get it fully functional. This project is interesting (to me anyway) because it calls a page from the Multiple Listing Service used by realtors — which requires a Cold Fusion interface. I’ve never used Cold Fusion so it could have been a bit trickly. We wound up leaving the MLS page in its old format on the server where it had been being hosted by www.HS1.com and just treating it like another website. That way my client could switch over to a better domain name for the search engines — www.homes-for-sale-portland.com. Since only one page is being hosted on the old server, it’s no problem. Links for specific pages will be 301 Permanent Redirected to the new site, so should experience no loss of page rank at Google.

At the same time I am also working on SEO of this site: http://www.dsiworld.com – which is going through several layers of corporate marketing to approve each change. Taking some extra time, that one! It’s a nicely put together site using DreamWeaver, made by Dan Finney. Aside from some extra and apparently unavoidable code DreamWeaver has thrown in, it should optimize nicely.